Is it just me, or is "14" an unreasonably large number of ways to render the same template?

method does the heavy lifting of rendering your application’s content for use by a browser. There are a variety of ways to customize the behaviour of render . You can render the default view for a Rails template, or a specific template, or a file, or inline code, or nothing at all. You can render text, JSON , or XML . You can specify the content type or HTTP status of the rendered response as well.